1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to the field of collaboration software and, more particularly, to conditional reminders for conveyed electronic messages.
2. Description of the Related Art
An importance of electronic communication technologies continues to increase as technology bridges geographic barriers, which once limited interpersonal interactions. For example, large organizations are increasing organizing activities along functional instead of geographic lines, which results in project specific teams being physically located in different regions. Despite these distances, email, text exchange messages (e.g., chat, instant messaging, and text messaging), co-browsing, teleconferencing, and other communication technologies permit team members to easily, efficiently, and effectively interact. An equivalent phenomenon has permeated social interactions as well, as recognized with an increasing utilization of social networking sites, such as MYSPACE, where geographic distance between social contacts is largely irrelevant.
An increasing reliance upon electronic communication technologies results in many new challenges for communicators. For instance, communicators commonly receive numerous different forms of important communications at approximately the same time. For example, a person can receive a phone call concerning one matter, an email concerning another, and a text exchange message about a third. In the course of handling all of these communications, it is very easy for the person to overlook one or more of the received communications. This is especially true if one of the matters is time sensitive (i.e., an instant messaging message asking if the person wants to go to lunch with a co-worker or friend, for example). Failure to respond in a timely fashion can result in a mistaken impression that a message recipient is intentionally ignoring a sender or believes the sender's correspondence to be relatively unimportant.
At present, many communication suites include a scheduling or time management component (e.g., a TODO list), which presents alerts or notices in advance of events. These notices, however, fail to significantly help with the above problem. For one thing, establishing a TODO item based upon a received communication generally requires the recipient to actively take actions to either accept a TODO item or to create a TODO item. In regards to sending TODO items to be accepted, it is a bit presumptuous and/or can be bad etiquette for senders to convey TODO items for many matters discussed in email or text exchange messages, such as possible lunch plans. This practice generally overloads a recipient's calendar with “annoying” entries that obscure entries within the calendar that the recipient finds to be extremely important. In regards to recipients establishing TODO items, the primary reason that a communication is not responded to is that a recipient is distracted by another matter or simply overlooks a correspondence. In either case, the recipient will certainly not take extra actions to establish a TODO item, when an equivalent time could be spent simply responding to the received message. What is needed is a solution for providing and/or configuring reminders for electronic messages so that recipients do not overlook important messages or respond in an untimely fashion.